Artists of past and present ARTISTS OF PAST AND PRESENT | Page 134
Ellison Robertson
Ellison Robertson was born In Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1947, and spent most of his childhood in various
coal-mining towns in the industrial heartland of the Cape Breton Island. In a brief autobiography he
published Ellison has observed that "Like water to the fish and air to the birds, the experience of
growing up in these working-class communities was the medium that transparently shaped my
consciousness. It is clear enough in memory that my senses never completely denied the legacy of
exploitation, struggle and poverty that had constructed these experiences".
Ellison showed artistic promise early, and in 1966 was recommended by his teachers for a scholarship
to study in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), where four years later, upon
graduation, he won the college’s Lieutenant Governor's Award.
What emerged in the late 1970's and throughout the 1980's and 90's were powerful, honest paintings
that documented and celebrated the people of Cape Breton: works that were never nostalgic, but
often politically charged and always reflective of the hardships and sufferings of a culturally rich
society that had long been and continued to be economically deprived and neglected.